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[–]SoCo 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

When you are a senior programmer and readily get what a spiral matrix is, but still don't have a clue what this data encoding has to do with voter registration....You get worried it is handwavy bullshit all the way down. This article didn't really point out anything directly and was quite empty. I guess I guess I have to skim through the videos to figure it out....

[–]SoCo 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

After watching the painful 2 hour video of a guy trying not to be clear about the results, but instead walk you through his crap-tastic layman's blooper-real at working with data.....

They FOIA'd the voter registrations for the state and began poking at it. Each registered voter had both a state and county voter ID number for each county they had lived in.

They attempted to reverse engineer how counties were assigned state ID numbers to give out. From their perspective it was a confusing mess. Using the results of best their determining of which state ID number blocks belong to which counties, they found some patterns.

They focused on analyzing the gaps between state ID numbers allotted. They saw a pattern in the deviation of these gaps...and went a bit into the deep end of Bible Code breakers territory....

...Yet, what they found does seem like a possible attempt to hide a bunch of registrations into the list, by spreading them over the list, instead of just appending them, with what appears to be algorithmic interlacing resulting in the pattern they found. They briefly showed some of these special pattern registrations coming in blocks with the same voter registration dates, which seemed fictitious (Jan 1st is a holiday) and some other oddities.

The video did a poor job of showing all of what they found and there is a high likelihood that the pattern is just a benign result of some detail of many decades of maintaining a large registered voter list they aren't aware of. One can imagine the whole system gets revisionism every decade or two and even more often it is refactored, imported, or hand entered into a new management system...not to mention many very different county systems working together.

Despite this, it seems a bit concerning and worthy of some explanation from election officials. It appears like someone might have stuffed a whole lot of possibly fake voter registrations into the list at some point, and spread them out to not be noticed.